General

Rego, the language powering the Open Policy Agent (OPA), has become an indispensable tool for developers and security professionals alike. In order to kickstart your journey with Rego, it makes sense to first understand some of the basics. I put the cart before the horse by first posting how to use Rego in Rego Based Policies in Cyral. In this guide, we will delve into the depths of Rego and explore how you can leverage its capabilities to enhance your policy as code practices. ...

From time to time, I end up documenting very specific details like my Integrating Cyral with Jira Cloud post. This is another case where I recently had to develop some customer Rego based policies for a specific use case at Cyral. When I first started working at Cyral, I did not know the Rego language. I’ve had to learn it over the years since it’s what drives many of the policy related decisions for our platform. We recently announced a change in our 4.5 release that allows for customers to be able to write their own policies using the Rego language. This post covers an example of building a policy with Rego using this new framework. ...

I was talking to a co-worker recently about my use of docker instead of virtual environments (venv) and he mentioned that I should probably write something up about it. It didn’t occur to me that this might be a more preferred method than venv until I had this discussion. It makes sense to briefly explain venv and then how I use docker instead. What Are Virtual Environments (venv)? I think this is a great place to start. If you’ve ever used Python, you’ve probably seen some mention of virtual environment (venv). I won’t go too crazy on explaining them and how to use them. In short, venv allows you to create a Python environment that is self contained to help you not clutter up your machine with various libraries. Worse yet, if you need to run multiple versions of the same library, you can have issues running everything in one environment. For the real details, I suggest you check out the Python documentation on venv. ...

In Tinkering With Artificial Intelligence Blog Writing, I talked about tinkering with some various AI engines. Google has just come out with their AI Chatbot, Bard. As you can see from the blog post, Bard has been out for awhile but was only open to internal use. Google recently started providing invites to the public to use Bard. Yesterday, I received my invite to use Bard! My very first thought was to try and use Bard to generate a blog post. While the other AI products I used had specific blog writing tools, Bard is more like ChatGPT. Bard is a chatbot so it was easier to generate my content. ...

What can I say, upkeep sucks. I had made a number of changes as I migrated this blog from one platform to another. After the migrations, I even made some changes to WordPress. After making all of those changes, everything was broken but it didn’t matter. I had lots of leftover static content that allowed the broken links to function or so I thought. After making my blog searchable, I had a friend of mine reach out, David, reached out to let me know that I had some broken links. I didn’t think too much of it until I realized what all was broken. ...